IBM today announced the second generation of its BlueGene supercomputer technology. The system will scale to a performance of 3 PFlops, which more than 10 times the performance than today’s fastest supercomputer in operation.

Opinion – Last week we posted an article entitled “Analysis: Has Intel found the key to unlock supercomputing powers on the desktop?” in which I discussed several facets of a potential Intel technology without going into too many of the technical details. At the time of our posting, Intel had not yet publicly released the paper describing the technology, which prevented me from going into certain details.

Intel already confirmed that 45 nm processors will be in mass-production by the end of the year, but there have been questions about the actual announcement and availability of these new Penryn core-based processors.